If you own a website, you know that it can be really tough getting quality traffic. It does not matter how good your product or service is, your website need search engine optimization or SEO. A SEO web professional can effectively pull in traffic for you in a way that is unforced and interest driven. You are not making a better sales pitch. The objective of a SEO web professional is to gently herd in people who are already looking for what you can provide. This is how the SEO web professional does it:

1. Keeping content fresh. A search engine like Google or Yahoo looks for fresh content. They do not want to provide their users with content that is out of date or recommend websites that are out of service. This is why search engines are sensitive to fresh content. Keeping an updated blog is a great way to maintain fresh content. Another advantage is that you get a higher return visitor rating if there is always something new to see or read.

2. Link aggressively. This is the part where you need consistent hard work over a long period of time. A lot of patience is required for creating back links to pull in traffic. What you need is to convince other websites relevant to your website to refer you with a link so visitors to their website will visit your website too. How do you do this? Don’t websites compete? They won’t share traffic. You are right, they won’t share, but they might reciprocate. If you link them, they might return the courtesy and link you too. Exchange as many links as you can with popular and established websites related to your own niche.

3. Do the little things. After you have accomplished the basics of SEO web development, do these follow up tips.

a. Write articles related to your website content to submit to popular article directories. These directories have standard and will only accept to publish your article if it is original and useful. Getting these articles out will refer readers to your website and will introduce you as an expert. b. Be active in blogs and forums related to your website contents. This means commenting and reading blogs and forums of other people with the same interests. Making comments will leave your link for others to see. c. Post a classified. There are many free classifieds consumers often use to find what they need. Post on these classifieds to advertise, but remember to keep posts fresh. A classified ad has an expiry date and will be removed after a certain period of time.

These are pointers you can do to help draw in hits to your website. Building links will get you to your website. Building links will get you noticed by search engines and keep the traffic fresh and flowing.

What is local search engine optimization?

A SEO web professional can cater to world wide traffic of just traffic in your location. After all, if you are a small business operating in a small area, you are not interested in consumers half way across the world. You want local people. A SEO web professional can do this for you.

The needs of a large business that operates world wide is very different. While getting traffic from all over the world will benefit a global business, this is really irrelevant to a local business. A good SEO professional should be able to make subtle changes to make the SEO service relevant to the website.

What a SEO professional can do is make the local business sensitive specifically to local searches on search engines. When you type in key words in search engine, you want information you can use in a practical way.

The internet may have global influence, but its real target is local. The search engine gets ahead by being useful to people whose need are local. There are countless small online businesses that will offer to sell products and services just as efficiently as big businesses. This is because they have the marketing reach of the internet and the sensitivity to meet a local need. Consumers who consider themselves natives will be more loyal to a local product if they knew it existed.

Local search engine optimization uses basic techniques no different from global search engine optimization. A web professional will optimize your website using the same principles, except they will concentrate on getting top rankings for local searches only. Key words are chosen according to the flavour and individual tastes of your local target traffic. People in certain areas seem to favour different key words than generic key words used by global internet users. Careful research is done to find popular key word use specific to geography. If your area has local nickname or catch phrase, then that could be a location specific key word.

A local search should also provide a local address. Advertise your business address to get walk in customers aside from online inquiries and sales. If you mention the areas your business can provide for, people will know what to expect and you will not waste their time. Nor will they waste your time. This is the basic idea of pulling in target traffic. A web professional should know you want to attract customers who are looking for your services or products and can contact you through your website and buy.

Taking advantage of the professional Search Engine Optimization Services is very important, if you run an online business where you try to promote certain products/services. Before actually signing up for a certain SEO package, you should take some time and dwell upon whether you need Local SEO services or International seo. Internet Marketing strategies will truly prove useful and benefic for you, only if implemented correctly, and if you know which services to choose exactly. Nobody knows better what your business needs are, than you; therefore, take a few moments to reflect upon thee two practices and decide for yourself which one do you need:

* Local search engine optimization- if your business operates mainly on a local basis- for instance if you own a moving company which operates only in a given geographical area, then you need to implement local seo. When people will search for “moving Company Denver” for example, your business listing will pop up in the results page. You need to know that people looking for businesses in their geographical area usually use local search engines. A presence of your business here will definitely bring you more traffic, and ultimately a boost to your entire business.

* International seo- well, this is a strategy mainly advisable for people who run an online business selling certain goods. If for example you want to expand your business and make available your products for foreign audiences as well, then you need International seo. This process includes a wide range of services which you can choose from. Such is optimization of your webpage for the.de (Germany) or.se (Sweden) Google extensions. Then, whenever someone from Germany is searching for “Nike shoes” or whatever you are selling, than your business will pop up on the top of the list. Certainly International SEO implies much more services, and this is why you should consult with your SEO team about your needs.

Search Engine Optimization Services will be beneficial to you, if you only contract with professionals in the field. Read carefully through their offers, and then take your time to pick out those strategies that would truly move your business higher on the SERPs.

The key to writing persuasive keyword copy is to find that happy medium between pleasing the search engines and pleasing your readers. There are some basic rules of thumb that you can stick to as you attempt to accomplish this goal. In fact writing search engine and people friendly copy is as easy as chatting to a good friend.

First of all don’t cram your copy with keywords. Only use about three different keywords or keyword phrases per page. Keyword phrases are more effective than single words as people tend to type phrases, not single words into search engine boxes.

Don’t write less than 250 words in any one section of your website. It is possible for a search engine optimized article to be too short. Although when it comes to copy for search engine optimization it is important to be as concise and to the point as possible.

Try to write in grade six level conversational language. Don’t try to impress search engines or readers with your lofty knowledge of rare vocabulary. If you are writing these yourself, then try writing the way you talk and then incorporating the keywords into the copy after you have chatted to your readers on paper.

You know you are writing good SEO copy if no sentence looks like it was constructed to especially accommodate the keyword. You can tell these types of sentences because nobody can understand them. Even if the search engine spiders find them friendly, difficult to read content is only going to have your visitor moving on to another site (possibly your competitor’s) after they decide that your writing doesn’t make any sense at all. Writing in a natural but informed tone that is not too structured or crammed with keywords is the best approach to creating excellent SEO copy.

SEO Training is a fast developing and changing industry, more so then any other industry I have ever known. Search engine optimization (SEO) is quickly replacing PPC advertising as more CEO’s begin to see the worth of cheaply reaching massive audiences with highly targeted buyers, seeking information on the company’s products or services. SEO must be part of your overall marketing plan and budget.

PPC advertising is extremely quick and targeted, but PPC is an expense and once the money is spent the worth is zero. SEO on the other hand is an investment in a high quality web asset that will deliver extremely high ROI for many years after the investment ceases.

High quality SEO Training will deliver skills to attract very highly targeted leads and in most cases the CEO in consultation with the SEO experts can precisely target and measure the exact leads they want and the ones they want to avoid.

Much to our disgust most organizations leave all the SEO activities to someone in the IT area who has no SEO training or mentoring and a person who is usually at best a web page designer or hardware tech guru.? Unfortunately these people have only a very basic knowledge of SEO, and when it comes to internet business, SEO is the most critical step in the whole process. These days even a lot of the most professional looking websites on the internet score less then 10% when they are put through a mild SEO test.

Most expert SEO people we mix with are self taught, highly skilled through knowledge sharing on public forums and enrollment in online courses. SEO Training and SEO courses, unfortunately is not something that can be taught well in traditional educational institutions. The reason for this is that the rules in SEO change so fast and so regularly that Universities and Colleges would often be teaching redundant information by the time they developed course material, recruited staff, advertised and took enrollments and then delivered a course.

Sure the basics of SEO Training can be taught this way, but the cutting edge is very different. Over and over again we find that the best way for a company to conduct its SEO work is either to completely outsource the task or to hire a consultant for a budgeted number of hours to assist, mentor or report on what needs changing.

Without a doubt one of the biggest things to hit the Internet today is the amount of SEO “Search Engine Optimization” sites popping up all over the place. Even “Web Hosts” are now advertising to SEO your site for a fixed fee who you might be hosted with. It really does seem to be the hottest internet craze and many people cashing in on the rush to create new forms of SEO software to sell!!!

So why is SEO so important?

Let’s say you running a site about CARS and your trying to get new members to come and join. Your faced with a big problem, there are also hundreds if not thousands of other CAR sites out as well – all fighting to get new members. So any tool you can use to point new users to your site first by ranking it high in search engines like Google etc is a big plus factor for your sites future growth (even more so if your selling a product).

So what does SEO do to help me?

What SEO does in a nutshell is convert all your web or forum pages into much more user friendly links, which in turn can then be indexed by search engines much easier and faster. Which means they will get ranked higher along with many more pages listed.

The benefits of this are quite obvious: The more pages you have indexed in search engines, along with a higher rank. Means your going to bring many more users to your site. Which in turn can be converted into more members joining your site faster than if you didn’t use SEO. Simple case of mathermatics.

Will it cost me money to SEO my site?

Well the short answer to this is: Yes and No.

There are many guides out there on the internet which can be found quite easy using Google as a search tool to find them, that will explain how you can SEO your site yourself “DIY”. There are also paid products out there that can make this easy for you (designed for certain forum boards like “vBSEO” is for use with vBulletin forum boards).

Which route you take depends on your knowledge of being able to understand how it all works and make the code changes yourself accordingly. If your a novice, off course you can always just buy a product and make things easy for yourself.

Are there any disadvantages of using SEO?

The only thing you need to remember is that nothing last forever – other sites are also choosing to SEO there sites also just like you. And over time this will effect your ranking as more and more sites go the same SEO way. So while in the short term you might be impressed with the results. Over time as more sites get SEO’d, this will have an adverse effect on your site in general as there sites begin to take advantage of a higher rank with more pages listed in search engines.

All search engine optimizers know the importance of optimizing the anchor text of external links pointing to your Web pages. It makes for good SEO off page optimization. But it is also very important that as an SEO, that you optimize the internal link structure of your Web site pages. The home/index page of your Web site is the most important page of your site. And so it is very important that *all* of your internal pages have a link pointing back to your Web site’s home page. Another very important SEO internal link optimization tip is to have your main keywords and keyword phrases in the url’s of your site’s internal pages.

The anchor text of a link, according to Wikipedia, is “The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.” Search engines use the anchor text to help determine what a given Web page is about. It’s very important to note here that if you link to a Web page calling it “Red Widgets”, then that page had better be all about “Red Widgets.” There is no way to know how much weight or importance is placed on internal links by the major search engines. But it is obviously important.

Since it is important to use keyword rich anchor text in the internal link structure of your Web site, you need to make sure that all of your sidebar links, menus and also links within the main body content of your Web pages contain keywords in the anchor text of your internal links. Always make sure that the actual content of any given Web page matches what the anchor text is calling that page. Using our “Red Widgets” example from above, if you link to a page on your site using “Red Widgets” as the anchor text, then the keyword phrase “Red Widgets” should be in the Title of that page, in the Meta keywords and Meta description tags, in header tags, in your image alt tags, in the main body text area and so on.

It is also important that you include a Site Map page with your Web site. And of course you will want to include *all* of the pages to your Web site on this page. It is very important that you don’t have any orphan pages, that is pages to your site; but that are not linked to from any other site page. Use descriptive keywords to describe your pages. Instead of linking back to “Home”, instead use something like “Widgets Home.” Also, everytime that you come to a keyword or key phrase in your pages, turn those keywords into clickable anchor text that link to the relevant pages in question.

To have good internal link optimization for your Web site, you should:

•Link all site pages back to your home page. •When you have keywords in your text that pertain to another page on your Web site, then make that be a link to the other relevant page. •Use your main keywords in the anchor text of your internal links. •Make sure that the pages you link to are 100% about that topic. •Include a Site Map page to your site and use keyword descriptive anchor text. •Don’t have any orphan pages to your site. •Use your *main* keyword to link to your home/index page, such as “Main Keyword Home.” Remember that the links within your Website count just as much as external links to your pages do.